Although all GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB graphics cards that were available in the market a while ago were none other but a copy of Nvidia’s reference design, the unique modifications of this graphics adapter were destined to appear sooner or later. We would like to offer you a review of one solution like that that is not only superior to all exiting GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards, but also outperforms the GeForce 9800 GTX!

According to our testing methodology, the drivers were set up to provide the highest possible quality of texture filtering and to minimize the effect of software optimizations used by default by both: AMD/ATI and Nvidia. Also, to ensure maximum image quality, we enabled transparent texture filtering - Adaptive Anti-Aliasing/Multi-sampling for ATI Catalyst and Antialiasing – Transparency: Multisampling for Nvidia ForceWare. As a result, our ATI and Nvidia driver settings looked as follows:

ATI Catalyst:

Catalyst A.I.: Standard

Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality

High Quality AF: On

Wait for vertical refresh: Always Off

Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: On/Quality

Method: Multi-sampling

Temporal Anti-Aliasing: Off

Other settings: default

Nvidia ForceWare:

Texture filtering - Quality: High quality

Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: Off

Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off

Vertical sync: Force off

Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On

Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling

Other settings: default

For our tests we used the following games and benchmarks:

First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2142

Bioshock

Call of Juarez

Call of Duty 4

Crysis

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

Unreal Tournament 3

Third-Person 3D Shooters

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

Tomb Raider: Legend

RPG

Hellgate: London

Gothic 3

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Strategies

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

World in Conflict

Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark05

Futuremark 3DMark06

We selected the highest possible level of detail in each game using standard tools provided by the game itself from the gaming menu. The games configuration files weren’t modified in any way. The only exception was Enemy Territory: Quake Wars game where we disabled the built-in fps rate limitation locked at 30fps.

Games supporting DirectX 10 were tested in this particular mode. With a few exceptions, the tests were performed in the following most widely spread resolutions: 1280x1024/960, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. If the game didn’t support 16:10 display format, we set the last resolution to 1920x1440. We used “eye candy” mode everywhere, where it was possible without disabling the HDR/Shader Model 3.0/Shader Model 4.0. Namely, we ran the tests with enabled anisotropic filtering 16x as well as MSAA 4x antialiasing. We enabled them from the game’s menu. If this was not possible, we forced them using the appropriate driver settings of ATI Catalyst and Nvidia ForceWare drivers

Performance was measured with the games’ own tools and the original demos were recorded if possible. Otherwise, the performance was measured manually with Fraps utility version 2.9.1. We measured not only the average speed, but also the minimum speed of the cards where possible.

For the sake of more illustrative analysis we have also included the following graphics cards to participate in this test session: